It seems like every time you turn around, there's always someone going on about the "latest and greatest" framework that's just popped up and how it'll change the way you write your code. Of course, not all of them are all their cracked up to be, and in his new postJared White looks at some of the things they'd need to be to make it.

The race is on to take a bite out of the Web development platform pie and become the dominant PHP 5 framework. Who are the players? What are the stakes? Who will win? This essay will spell it all out for you in black and white.

He starts with a clean slate, looking first at what a framework really is, it's usefulness, and a few of the general issues that surround their use. Also, based on the latest PHP stats (from Nexen.net), the gap between the use of PHP4 and PHP5 is still very large, making developing frameworks a bit more tricky.

Jared also lists out three objectives that the future of PHP will have to hold to make this gap get any smaller (and make developing applications a simpler process). Basically: